θεοῦ, εἰς τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἱστορία ἐπωφελής· καὶ περὶ τῆς χριστιανικῆς πολιτείας, ὅπως συνέστη· καὶ κατὰ πάντων τῶν αἱρετικῶν or simply De Oeconomia Dei covering the whole province of theology in five separate books, is ascribed to the twelfth-century monk Nilus Doxopatres, related to but certainly not identical with the eleventh-century John Doxopatres; the first two books, treating respectively of Adam and Christ, are all that remain. A number of other dogmatic florilegia are still extant in manuscript form. The authors of most of them are unknown. Ascetical florilegia The ascetical florilegia are collections of moral sentences and excerpts drawn partly from the Scriptures and partly from the Fathers, on such topics as virtues and vices, duties and exercises of a religious life, faith, discipline, etc. They are not so numerous as the dogmatic florilegia, and apparently were all compiled before the tenth century. Their material, as a rule, is gathered indiscriminately from various authorities, though in some instances it is furnished by only a single writer, a distinct preference being then shown for the works of the more illustrious Fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. John Chrysostom. An extensive Christian florilegium of the sixth century, entitled tà ‘ierá (Sacred Things), is probably the earliest of these anthologies. The work consisted originally of three books, the first of which treated of God, the second of man, and the third of the virtues and vices. In the course of time it underwent contraction into one book, its material was recast and arranged in alphabetical order under títloi, or sections, its name changed to tà ‘ierà parállela, Sacra Parallela (from the fact that in the third book a virtue and a vice were regularly contrasted or paralleled), and its authorship widely ascribed to St. John Damascene. That the Damascene was really the compiler of the "Sacra Parallela", and that he used as his principal source the "Capita theologica", a florilegium of Maximus Confessor, has been maintained firmly (against Friedrich Loofs, Paul Wendland, and Jonas Cohn) by Karl Holl. Though tà ‘ierá is no longer extant in its original form, considerable portions of the first two books have come down to us in manuscript, and parts of the third are preserved in "The Bee" (Melissa) of Antonius, a Greek monk of the eleventh century. Of the Sacra Parallela there are several recensions, one of which is given in Migne. Other extant